Urban Road Surface Discrimination by Tire-Road Noise Analysis and Data Clustering.

The surface condition of roadways has direct consequences on a wide range of processes related to the transportation technology, quality of road facilities, road safety, and traffic noise emissions. Methods developed for detection of road surface condition are crucial for maintenance and rehabilitation plans, also relevant for driving environment detection for autonomous transportation systems and e-mobility solutions. In this paper, the clustering of the tire-road noise emission features is proposed to detect the condition of the wheel tracks regions during naturalistic driving events.

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Muted and Remixed the World's Acoustics for a While.

Purpose Of Review: This review aims to analyze the effects of the pandemic on the world's sound environment.

Recent Findings: The confinements associated with the pandemic led to a reduction in sound levels worldwide and a change in the perception of soundscapes in the absence of traffic noise and human-generated noise.

Summary: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries and regions around the world adopted a series of interventions in 2020 that have been referred to as "lockdown" or "confinement.

Does exposure to noise pollution influence the incidence and severity of COVID-19?

Research that analyzes the effect of different environmental factors on the impact of COVID-19 focus primarily on meteorological variables such as humidity and temperature or on air pollution variables. However, noise pollution is also a relevant environmental factor that contributes to the worsening of chronic cardiovascular diseases and even diabetes. This study analyzes the role of short-term noise pollution levels on the incidence and severity of cases of COVID-19 in Madrid from February 1 to May 31, 2020.

Changes in noise levels in the city of Madrid during COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.

The lockdown that Madrid has suffered during the months of March to June 2020 to try to control and minimize the spread of COVID-19 has significantly altered the acoustic environment of the city. The absence of vehicles and people on the streets has led to a noise reduction captured by the monitoring network of the City of Madrid. In this article, an analysis has been carried out to describe the reduction in noise pollution that has occurred and to analyze the changes in the temporal patterns of noise, which are strongly correlated with the adaptation of the population's activity and behavior to the new circumstances.

A Taxonomy Proposal for the Assessment of the Changes in Soundscape Resulting from the COVID-19 Lockdown.

Many countries around the world have chosen lockdown and restrictions on people's mobility as the main strategies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. These actions have significantly affected environmental noise and modified urban soundscapes, opening up an unprecedented opportunity for research in the field. In order to enable these investigations to be carried out in a more harmonized and consistent manner, this paper makes a proposal for a set of indicators that will enable to address the challenge from a number of different approaches.

A Digital Signal Processor Based Acoustic Sensor for Outdoor Noise Monitoring in Smart Cities.

Presently, large cities have significant problems with noise pollution due to human activity. Transportation, economic activities, and leisure activities have an important impact on noise pollution. Acoustic noise monitoring must be done with equipment of high quality.

Beyond sound level monitoring: Exploitation of social media to gather citizens subjective response to noise.

Subjective response to noise is probably the most important goal in environmental acoustics. Traditional surveys have the drawback of high cost deriving from its development and execution, the limited number of participants, and the duration of the surveying campaign. The main drawbacks of online surveys are the low participation, or the self-produced bias that concerns about the topic can raise.

Communicating airport noise emission data to the general public.

Despite the efforts that the aviation industry has undertaken during the last few decades, noise annoyance remains high, partly because of the continuous transport demands of modern societies and partly because of changes in citizen expectations and their growing environmental concerns. Although modern aircraft are considerably quieter than their predecessors, the number of complaints has not decreased as much as expected. Therefore, the aeronautical sector has tried more sociological and/or psychological strategies to gain acceptance through awareness and community engagement.

Consequences of moduli stabilization in the Einstein-Maxwell landscape.

A toy landscape sector is introduced as a compactification of the Einstein-Maxwell model on a product of two spheres. Features of the model include moduli stabilization, a distribution of the effective cosmological constant of the dimensionally reduced 1 + 1 spacetime, which is different from the analogous distribution of the Bousso-Polchinski landscape, and the absence of the so-called α* problem. This problem arises when the Kachru-Kallosh-Linde-Trivedi stabilization mechanism is naively applied to the states of the Bousso-Polchinski landscape.